The present invention relates to protective equipment, and more particularly, to protective equipment having shielding components moveable relative to one another.
In contact and high impact sports, such as hockey, lacrosse, football, and motocross, participants are routinely subject to high impact forces generated by body blows, checks, falls, and/or hits with sticks or helmets. The participant's fingers, hands, elbows, knees and shoulders are especially vulnerable to injury when being forcibly impacted. Accordingly, participants typically wear padded equipment, such as gloves, elbow pads, knee pads and shoulder pads to protect the respective parts of their body.
Even while wearing the protective equipment, certain areas of a player's body can be susceptible to injury. Those areas usually correspond to locations where the protective equipment bends to enable flexing of an underlying joint, such as the wrist, knuckles, elbows, knees or shoulders. During such bending, the joint can be exposed if the protective equipment retracts from the underlying joint, leaving the joint susceptible to injury during flexion by impact forces.
Certain protective equipment includes individual segments of protective plates connected to one another at fixed, pivot joints to allow relative pivotal movement between the adjacent segments along a fixed, single axis of rotation. Although conventional pivot joints generally allow movement of the user's underlying joint, they also artificially constrain that movement because human joints do not generally pivot about a single, fixed axis of rotation.
Another issue with fixed pivot points corresponding to joints in protective equipment is that such constructions can be complicated and relatively costly. For example, pivoting parts of equipment attached at pivot points usually require pins or rivets installed through aligned holes in the pivoting parts. An example of this is illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 381,687, which shows a baseball glove including multiple finger plates pivotally joined at pivot points with pins. The component and assembly costs of such pivoting constructions can be prohibitive.